Conference

Abstract

With the publication of Martin Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’ (volumes 94–97 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe), Heidegger’s credibility as a European and global thinker has once again, and more gravely, come into question. Heidegger’s astonishing claims about “the peculiar predetermination of Jewishness for planetary criminality” (a phrase, according to Peter Trawny, omitted by Fritz Heidegger from the published edition of vol. 69 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe) can be found echoed in these notebooks. Yet foremost among the ‘Christian Jewishness’ that Heidegger identifies must be counted the thought of Hegel, the one whose “destructive” metaphysics, he tells us, is completed “through Marx”, and that stands opposed to “the first beginning with the Greeks”. Hegel, even more than Marx, can be said to be the first ‘planetary’ thinker of Western metaphysics, in that he is the first to realise absolute subjectivity as an absolute politics, and yet all too little attention has been paid to Heidegger’s engagement with Hegel. How is Heidegger’s “anti-Jewishness” to be understood? Must Heidegger now, and once and for all, be set aside? Or could Hegel help us to read Heidegger again?